In the retail trade it is standard practice for a customer to order, for example, a quarter pound of sliced salami. In a shop selling fresh products the vendor normally then places the whole salami onto the slicing machine, sets the machine to produce slices of the requested or standard thickness for the particular cold cut, and cuts off a number of slices whose aggregate weight the vendor judges to be approximately the requested weight. During this procedure the vendor, especially when not highly experienced, interrupts the slicing operation to set the already cut slices down on the scale to verify the weight. Such a procedure is time consuming and, therefore, uneconomical.
Machines are also known, such as described in my copending and commonly assigned application Ser. No. 901,710 filed 1 May 1978 and in my jointly filed application Ser. No. 911,290, whose entire disclosures are herewith incorporated by references, which automatically form a succession of slices and even deposit this succession of slices on a support table in a plurality of rows, with the slices in each row being offset to each other and each row being offset to the adjacent rows. Even in such an automatic apparatus, however, the vendor is normally required to interrupt the automatic operation to make sample weighings to check if the quantity of slices has the proper weight. Each time the operation is interrupted valuable time is lost and the array of slices on the support table is not usually replaced in the exact position for production of an attractive and uniform array.
Another machine is known which produces a succession of slices all of approximately the same volume. This machine has a pair of feelers, one of which measures the diameter of the foodstuff--sausage, cheese, meat--and the other of which measures the thickness of the slices. The machine is set up automatically to increase the thickness when the width or diameter decreases and vice versa. Such a machine can, therefore, be set up to produce a succession of slices of approximately uniform volume. Since the density, that is the ratio of mass to volume, of a given foodstuff in normally constant, the machine can therefore produce slices of approximately uniform weight so that a given number of slices can normally be expected to have a given weight. The disadvantage of such a machine, however, is that slices of nonuniform thickness are produced which often render them wholly unusable for various purposes, such as sandwich making.
Other prior-art arrangements can be seen in Austrian Pat. Nos. 324,974 and 328,317, in Swiss Pat. Nos. 326,939 and 376,381, and in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,142,323 and 3,220,498.